Tomography is the art of creating an image of a sectional plane within a body. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a technique for high-resolution cross-sectional imaging of scattering media. The basic technique is described in Brett E. Bouma and Guillermo J. Tearney, Handbook of Optical Coherence Tomography. Marcel Dekker Inc., New York Basel, 2002, the contents of which are herein incorporated by reference.
Most OCT systems use 3-axis point-scanning based technology. However, this technique is slow and cumbersome. A few OCT systems work directly on a two-dimensional full field image using a sinusoidal-phase-modulation method. Examples of such systems are described in Arnaud Dubois, Laurent Vabre, Albert-Claude Boccara and Emmanuel Beaurepaire, “High-resolution full-field optical coherence tomography with a Linnik microscope”, Applied Optics, 41, 4, 805–812, 2002; and Arnaud Dubois, “Phase-map measurements by interferometry with sinusoidal phase modulation and four integrating buckets,” Journal of Optic Society of America, A, 18, 8, 1972–1979, 2001. The related electronics hardware and algorithm make such systems complex and expensive.